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Category Archives: Tiananmen Square massacre 1989

“It’s time to become a revolutionary hero!” Tang thought, evoking the heroic tales from her textbooks of communist martyrs who were killed in the civil war, or by the invading Japanese.

The iconic image of a heroic rebel blocking a tank in Tiananmen Square 30 years ago is inspirational to any people, anywhere, fighting oppression. The identity of that person, and what became of him, are unknown. In that sense, he is ‘nobody’.

Of course, an individual can’t overthrow tyranny but, as history shows, you need masses of people with courage and willingness to make sacrifices under certain circumstances.

I came across this cartoon at the facebook page of Rose Tang, a veteran of Tiananmen Square. Her reminiscences of the event are worth reading.

‘Nobody can change anything’ – ‘nothing changes’ – are catch-cries of conservatism. The preference for stability, even under conditions akin to fascism, is also a hallmark of the pseudo-left. It is a particularly obnoxious attitude when those expressing it do not live under such conditions but the under the more preferable situation of bourgeois democracy.

We are indeed all nobody. Together, as nobodies, we can win the world!

‘State security agents seized him that day from Beijing’s outskirts, his classmates say. Qiu’s offense? He was the leader of the Marxist student association at the elite Peking University, a communist of conscience who defied the Communist Party of China.

‘Over the past eight months, China’s ruling party has gone to extraordinary lengths to shut down the small club of students at the country’s top university. Peking University’s young Marxists drew the government’s ire after they campaigned for workers’ rights and openly criticized social inequality and corruption in China.

‘That alone was provocative. In recent years, China’s leaders have been highly sensitive to rumblings of labor unrest as the sputtering economy lays bare the divides between rich and poor — fissures that were formed, and mostly overlooked, during decades of white-hot growth’.

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June 4th marks the 30th anniversary of the day on which troops entered Tiananmen Square and opened fire upon protestors. It was an outcome of the restoration of capitalism in China, the victory of the ‘capitalist roaders’ within the Communist Party that Mao had warned against and led struggle against.

The idea that things can turn into their opposite is a very challenging one, but it is true.

The violent repression at Tiananmen Square is proof that the Communist Party was no longer revolutionary, no longer socialist but a case of ‘capitalism without democracy’.